Determinants of quality of life person with disabilities in Malaysia

To maximize the quality of life (QoL) among persons with disabilities (PWDs) in Malaysia, it is important to identify factors that are strongly associated with the QoL of PWDs. The aim of this study is to identify the determinants of QoL among PWDs in Malaysia. A cross-sectional study approach was applied covering 340 participants with hearing impairments, visual impairments, and physical disabilities. A multiple regression analysis was performed to determine the determinants of QoL. The seven QoL domains namely physical health, psychological, social relationships, environment, discrimination, autonomy, and inclusion were considered as dependent variables while demographic profile, socio-economic status, and disability history were considered independent variables. The contribution of independent variables to most of the QoL domains was modest. This study found that type of disabilities is a significant determinant for physical health, psychological, environment, discrimination, and inclusion domains. Meanwhile, the level of education is a significant determinant in the environment and autonomy domain. It was also found that age group is a significant determinant in the psychological domain. Meanwhile, employment status is a significant determinant in physical health domains. However, self-rated health is not significant in the discrimination domain. Both PWDs with good health conditions or PWDs with unhealthy conditions face the same experience of discrimination. These findings supplement the existing knowledge and contribute to future research, service planning initiatives, public education, and policy formulation. Furthermore, this study may aid social service stakeholders in evaluating the effectiveness of current activities and identifying trends for future planning

Least Cost Diet for Children Two to Three Years in Malaysia Using Linear Programming Approach

The early period of life, namely from birth to two years of age is critical for the promotion o f optimal growth, brain development as well as health and behavioural development. Thus, attaining the daily required nutrition during this stage of life is very crucial since nutrition is strongly associated with a child’s development at a very young age . It is a major challenge for Malaysians to ensure children get a balanced diet, especially children from families of low socioeconomic status. As reported in the Edge Weekly, the review found that 24.9% or nearly one in four children in Malaysia experien ced moderate or severe food insecurity due to financial constraints. In this study, a linear programming diet model is used to determine an affordable cheapest food basket that satisfies the daily recommended nutritional requirements for children between two to three years old in Malaysia. POM -QM for Windows Version 5.2 by Howard J. Weiss is used. Initial finding shows that the average costs are RM2.69. This food basket consists of 474g of eggs, 55g of tofu, 29g of papaya, 5g of spinach and 201g of potato. With this food basket and estimated food expenditure, parents can save for 40% of their child’s daily food expenditure

Quality of Life of Youths with and without Disabilities: A Comparative Study

Introduction: The objective of this paper is to compare the self-perceived Quality of Life (QOL) of youths with and without disabilities using WHOQOL-BREF instrument. Methods: A comparative study design was used in this study. A total of 300 disabled students and 523 non-disabled students (Controls) from Malaysian Higher Learning Institutions were involved. Data were collected by face to face interviews using WHOQOL-BREF instrument. The calculation of the mean score of each domain is using computational methods have been provided by WHO in manual WHOQOL-BREF. Descriptive analysis was used to analyze the characteristics of the respondents. The t-tests and one-way ANOVA were used to compare the mean scores of each domain with selected type of socio-demographics. Results: Mean age of disabled students were 21.7 years old (SD = 1.9), while non-disabled students were 22.34 years old (SD = 2.59). Overall mean score QOL Controls are higher than disabled students. Except in the social relationship domain, the disabled, students have significantly higher score compared to controls in domain physical, psychological and environmental. There are no significant differences in Overall QOL, physical, social relationship and environment between fields of study of controls. No significant different on overall QOL between types of disabilities, but, there are significant differences in the mean score between the types of disabilities with physical and social relationship domains. Conclusion: The mean score overall QoL of disabled students is significantly lower as compared to the non-disabled students. There are four items were identified as a factor contributes to lower overall QOL disabled students compare to controls. The items are two from social relationship domain (personal relationship and social support) and also two from global items (overall quality of life and general health) Keywords: WHOQOL-BREF; disabilities; university students, quality of life; comparative stud

Forecasting of Air Pollution Index PM2.5 Using Support Vector Machine(SVM)

Air pollution is a current monitored problem in areas with high population density such as big cities. Many regions in Malaysia are facing extreme air quality issues. This situation is caused by several factors such as human behavior, environmental awareness and technological development.  Accessing the air pollution index (API) accurately is very important to control its impact on environmental and human health.  The work presented here aims to access air pollution index of PM2.5 using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and to compare the accuracy of four different types of the kernel function in Support Vector Machine (SVM).  The data used is provided by the Department of Environment (DOE) and it is recorded from two Continuous Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAQM) located at Tanah Merah and Kota Bharu. The results are analyzed using mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE). It is found that the proposed model using Radial Basis Function (RBF) with its parameters of cost and gamma equal to 100 can effectively and accurately forecast the air pollution index with Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.03868583 and 0.06251793 respectively for API in Kota Bharu and 0.03857308 (MAE) and 0.05895648 (RMSE) for API in Tanah Merah

Fuzzy Time Series for Projecting School Enrolment in Malaysia

There are a variety of approaches to the problem of predicting educational enrolment.  However, none of them can be used when the historical data are linguistic values.  Fuzzy time series is an efficient and effective tool to deal with such problems. In this paper, the forecast of the enrolment of pre-primary, primary, secondary, and tertiary schools in Malaysia is carried out using fuzzy time series approaches. A fuzzy time series model is developed using historical dataset collected from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from the year 1981 to 2018.  A complete procedure is proposed which includes: fuzzifying the historical dataset, developing a fuzzy time series model, and calculating and interpreting the outputs. The accuracy of the model are also examined to evaluate how good the developed forecasting model is. It is tested based on the value of the mean squared error (MSE), Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) and Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD).  The lower the value of error measure, the higher the accuracy of the model.  The result shows that fuzzy time series model developed for primary school enrollments is the most accurate with the lowest error measure, with the MSE value being 0.38, MAPE 0.43 and MAD 0.43 respectively

Electrical double layer capacitor with proton conducting kappa-carrageenan-chitosan electrolytes

Charge-discharge characteristics of electrical double layer capacitors (EDLCs)using kappa-carrageenan-chitosan based electrolyte is the focus of the present work. Chitosan and kappa-carrageenan were blended to obtain films with high mechanical strength. The room temperature conductivity of 0.5 g chitosan + 0.5 g kappa-carrageenan (CCPA) film and 0.5 g chitosan + 0.5 g kappa-carrageenan + 0.1765 g ammonium nitrate(CCPAAN) film are (1.38 +/- 0.36) x 10(-6) S cm(-1) and (2.39 +/- 0.83) x 10(-4) S cm(-1), respectively. The conducting species is H(+) and conduction occurs via a Grotthuss mechanism. The resistance of the phenol resin based activated carbon electrode film is between 15 to 20 Omega. The capacitance of the EDLCs is stable over 20 cycles. The average discharge capacitance of the EDLC employing CCPAAN electrolyte and activated carbon electrodes is between 13 to 18.5 F g(-1)

A Comparative Study on Quality of Life among Youths with and without Disabilities

The objective of this paper is to compare the self-perceived Quality of Life (QoL) between disabled and non-disabled youths in Malaysia using the WHOQOL-BREF (World Health Organisation Quality of Life - Abbreviated version) instrument. A cross-sectional questionnaire-based survey of 300 disabled students and a control group comprising 523 non-disabled students from Malaysian higher learning institutions were the subjects for this study. The score for each domain was computed using the formula outlined by WHOQOLBREF. Descriptive analysis was used to analyse the characteristics of the respondents. Due to the non-normality of the score distribution, nonparametric Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare the mean scores of each domain across selected demographic variables. The mean age of the disabled students was 21.7 years old (SD=1.9), while that of the non-disabled students was 22.3 years old (SD=2.6). As expected, the mean total QoL score (TotQoL) of the non-disabled students was higher than that of the students with disabilities. Except for the social relationships domain, the disabled students had significantly higher mean scores for the physical health, psychological health and environment domains compared with the control group. For the disabled group, no significant difference was observed between males and females in the mean TotQoL as well as in the four domains. Hearing-impaired students were found to score the lowest TotQoL among the categories of disabled students. They also scored the lowest for the social relationships domain, with a mean score of 5.91 compared with 16.26 and 15.98 for visually- and mobility-impaired students, respectively. In conclusion, WHOQOL-BREF is a useful instrument for assessing QoL for various groups of people. Accessing the QoL of youth including PWDs could assist relevant policy-makers and stakeholders in identifying problems faced by PWDs and in designing relevant intervention programmes

Characteristics of methyl cellulose-NH4NO3-PEG electrolyte and application in fuel cells

We report the viability of methyl cellulose (MC) as a membrane in a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). Methyl cellulose serves as the polymer host, ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) as the doping salt and poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) as plasticizer. Conductivity measurement was carried out using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. The room temperature conductivity of pure MC film is is (3.08 +/- 0.63) x 10(-11)S cm(-1). The conductivity increased to (2.10 +/- 0.37) x 10(-6)S cm(-1) on addition of 25 wt.% NH4NO3. By adding 15 wt.% of PEG 200 to the highest conducting sample in the MC-NH4NO3 system, the conductivity was further raised by two orders of magnitude to (1.14 +/- 0.37) x 10(-4)S cm(-1). The highest conducting sample containing 15 wt.% PEG was used as membrane in PEMFC and was operated at room and elevated temperatures. From voltage-current density characteristics, the short circuit current density was 31.52 mA cm(-2) at room temperature (25 degrees C)